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Why are the New England Patriots, a team made up mostly of role-players,
poised to become the NFL's next great dynasty? The answer lies inside the
cranium of Bill Belichick, the smartest coach in football.
One Wednesday morning in
October, I watched Bill Belichick watch film of the Seattle Seahawks, his
next opponent. He had already watched forty hours of Seahawks film over the
last week and a half, in addition to the several Seahawks games from last
season that he'd studied during the summer. Such repeated exposure to the
same group of men executing the same tasks might numb a lesser man, but it
seemed to have the opposite effect on Belichick. It brought him to life.
His remote is a small black
thing nestled into the palm of his hand. Occasionally, he'll put it down and
reach for a cup of soda, or a cup full of popcorn or cookies. Sometimes
he'll whip the pencil stub out from behind his right ear and tap it on the
television screen to illustrate a 62-Z-under-H-wide. For the most part,
though, the only motion in the room is the flickering screen and his trigger
finger on the remote.
At one point, he froze the
tape to inspect the Seahawks offensive line, which was arranged in a perfect
semicircle around their quarterback. "That's as good a pocket as you're ever
going to see," he said, wearing an expression of profound respect, even joy.
It was an unusual look for a guy whose customary expression tends toward
equal parts impatience and boredom.
I had hoped that by watching
Belichick break down game film, I'd better learn the secret to how he's done
what he's done, which is take teams made up of players of average ability
and win an inordinate number of football games, including two of the last
three Super Bowls. On the day I sat with him watching film, his team had
just won its nineteenth consecutive game, a National Football League record,
and was about to win its twentieth.
My instincts turned out to be
only partly right. Watching film with Belichick gave me some insight, but
not because of any particular play or series he illuminated. Instead, it was
something he said when we were watching a game from last season, in which
the Patriots ground out a victory against a Dallas Cowboys team coached by
his former boss, Bill Parcells.
When I asked if he'd made any
adjustments at halftime, Belichick said, in his usual monotone, "We don't
wait till halftime. By the second series in the game, certainly by the end
of the first quarter, unless it's a very unusual game, the game is
declared." There it is. In a sport whose myths are forged on the feats of
astonishing athletes or on inspirational Gipperesque speeches, the best team
in professional sports has been built by a man who is, essentially, a
systems analyst. More than anything else, Belichick is guided by the modern
corporate philosophy – that in an industry where quality is pretty much equal
across the board, the most efficient and flexible system will win out.
* * * * * *
"Football is his life,"
Belichick's longtime defensive coordinator, Romeo Crennel, says about his
boss. Belichick's father played fullback for the Detroit Lions in 1941, and
then, for thirty-three years, was a coach and scout for the Navy football
team. When Belichick was a boy in Annapolis, he would ride week after week
with his dad to the Baltimore train station or to the airport to pick up
game film of an upcoming opponent. They'd then go home and set up the
projector and watch the film together on their dining-room wall.
Steve Belichick was a legend.
Leonard Shapiro of The Washington Post, who was then a young reporter
on the Eastern-college-football beat, recalls his chalk talks as displays of
genius. And Sandy Padwe of The Philadelphia Inquirer, now a
journalism professor at Columbia, remembers Steve Belichick's eccentricity
in the press box: "If you approached him in the press box, he'd wrap his
arms around all these papers and charts, as if to hide them, then look at
you warily and say, 'What do you want?'"
Bill played high school
football in Annapolis and at Andover, then attended Wesleyan University.
Mark Peters, one of Belichick's teammates, remembers him as a small,
cerebral lineman. "The problem with Bill was that he had this great mind and
this Wally Cox body," Peters says. "He was five nine, 165 pounds. He was
small and slow, and he didn't hit hard. Center was the only position he
could play. Put two large guys around him and save him." Soon after they
graduated, Belichick took Peters to a Navy-Notre Dame game. "Within the
first quarter," Peters says, "he told me what Notre Dame was going to do the
rest of the game. He could dissect a game like a Swiss watch."
Belichick earned a degree in
economics, but after interviews with corporate recruiters trying to lure him
into the brave new world of sales and marketing, he took a job with the
Baltimore Colts, watching game film for room and board at a motel. The job
also involved driving coaches to and from the stadium, which meant being
stuck in a station wagon for hours a day with three guys talking nothing but
football. "It was awesome," Belichick says now, so quietly I have to ask him
to repeat what he said. He looks at me flatly. "Awesome."
* * * * * *
In January 2000, Parcells
announced that he would no longer coach the New York Jets and that his job
would go to his longtime acolyte Bill Belichick. The next day, Belichick
assembled the New York press and, in a rambling, awkward speech, said he
didn't want the job. He'd gotten a better offer from the Patriots, where he
could work free of Parcells's gaze.
When Belichick arrived in New
England, blueprints for the new Gillette Stadium called for his office to be
up on the second floor, with the corporate and administrative staff,
accessible only through the stadium's huge ornate portal. Belichick asked
that it be moved down to the players' level, which is where it is now, in a
nondescript room that you reach by going through a small unmarked door in
the side of the stadium. The outsider in him had no desire to be up near the
suits, and the coach in him wanted to be near his players and free of
distraction.
Which doesn't mean that
Belichick has particularly warm relationships with his players; he appears
to have almost no personal relationship with them at all. But they are all
loyal to him, because they know that he represents the best chance they'll
ever have of winning a diamond-encrusted ring the size of a shotput.
"What he likes are
low-maintenance people," says Scott Pioli, the Patriots director of
personnel, who has been by Belichick's side off and on since 1985. "My job
is to weed out the knuckleheads."
Pioli works in a long,
windowless office, the walls of which are completely covered in tiny blocks
of type – the names of every player on
every roster in the league, organized by position, alphabetized, and
color-coded. In 2003, Pioli was the youngest person ever to win NFL
Executive of the Year. Of the sixty-four players on the Patriots team that
won the Super Bowl that year, fifty-six of them had been acquired since
Belichick and Pioli took over, in 2000. "I've been with him long enough to
know there are certain things he has patience for and certain things he
doesn't have patience for," says Pioli. "Why would we bring him players that
are going to contradict everything he believes in? Why would we make his job
tougher?"
What Pioli tries to deliver are players who
are smart and not interested in being stars. Rodney Harrison, an eleven-year
veteran who came to New England last season after being discarded by San
Diego Chargers coach Marty Schottenheimer, has emerged as a catalyst of the
stifling Patriots defense. "Ninety percent of these coaches blow smoke up
your butt," Harrison says. "They lie; they deceive you. Marty Schottenheimer
is a flat liar. You can see why he doesn't have success. He doesn't treat
guys with respect. If you're a veteran player, he gets rid of you. Bill
brings you in, gives you a chance. Not only that, he gives you input." Asked
for a sketch of the typical Patriot, Harrison responds, "You're a vet.
You're not a high-priced guy. Your number-one priority isn't making money;
it's winning ball games. He's not afraid to take veteran players – people who
have been cast out, who they say can't play anymore – and bring them into the
system."
It's also hard to discount the
motivational power of Belichick's love of deploying players in an unorthodox
fashion. This season, four Patriots have played both offense and defense. In
a November game against the St. Louis Rams, linebacker Mike Vrabel caught a
touchdown pass (as he also did in last year's Super Bowl), and kicker Adam
Vinitieri [sic] threw a TD to receiver Troy Brown, the man who best embodies the
Belichick ideal.
During preseason, Brown, a
twelve-year veteran and the Patriots' lone Pro Bowl wide receiver, started
learning the cornerback position. Patriots fans and the Boston media were
skeptical, but who would know how to cover receivers better than a receiver?
As injuries to defensive backs piled up during the season, Brown stepped in,
and during New England's November 14 trouncing of the surging Buffalo Bills,
he picked off a pass by Drew Bledsoe, his former teammate, to ice the game.
But Belichick knows that all
of his lab work, all the methodical searching through frames of tape, will
be useless if no one can follow his directions. When I ask him to explain
how he gets his players up to speed with a specific week's plan, he says,
"Figure out what your options are. Not what's best, but what you think you
can execute the best. It's not always the idea, but how you think the idea
will fit with the makeup of your team. You can sit there and say, 'Boy, this
would be great,' but if you have to put all this shit in, if there are too
many moving parts, you'll probably screw it up. Then that's not your best
choice."
Quarterback Tom Brady puts it
even more succinctly: "He doesn't give us fifty things to think about."
There's no denying that
Belichick's game plans are astonishingly simple. In 2001 the Patriots lost
to the Rams in the regular season and were two-touchdown underdogs when they
met them in the Super Bowl. A lesser coach might have erred on the side of
complexity, but Belichick's plan for the rematch was downright pedestrian.
"I told the defensive team, 'We blitzed forty-five times. We're not going to
do that again, okay? We fucked that up.'" Instead, they focused on the Rams'
all-purpose running back, Marshall Faulk, leaving quarterback Kurt Warner
with only his passing game to rely on. Warner proved human.
To reach the Super Bowl last
year, the Patriots had to find a way to overcome the Indianapolis Colts,
whose quarterback, Peyton Manning, was being deemed unbeatable by most
football analysts. This time Belichick went straight at Manning, using
faster defensive linemen to exploit the slower Colts offensive line. Jarvis
Green, a substitute lineman whom no one had ever heard of, sacked Manning
three times, and the Patriots forced him to throw four interceptions. It was
as perfect a display of Belichick football as there is: Focus on a single,
achievable task, then depend on average guys to make big plays that
completely surprise your opponent.
* * * * * *
On October 10, I watched
Belichick walk into the interview room in Gillette Stadium after the
Patriots had just set the record for consecutive wins. It was a record that,
in the days leading up to the game, he didn't seem to care about very much.
But now he was smiling. "That felt good," he said, and for a moment I
thought that maybe the win, the record, had actually changed him, or at
least revealed a side of him he never shows. But then it became clear that
he was referring not to the game but to the Gatorade bath he'd taken at the
end of a hot day. The rehash of the historic game's details seemed only to
bore him intensely.
His place in football history
in general doesn't seem to concern him. At 52, he has now spent thirty
consecutive years in the league, more than any other active head coach, but
when I asked him if he planned to grow old on the job or retire and spend
more time on the beach on Nantucket, where he owns a home, he said, "I'm not
going to be Marv Levy. You won't be looking for me when I'm 72. It's a
short-term thing for me. I don't think about where I'll be in three years.
Or a year. I'm just worried about this week." But there in his office, with
the light leaking in between the slats of the closed blinds, wearing a
cut-off sweatshirt as he rewound and fast-forwarded and the screen filled
with C-gaps and back-shoulder throws, he didn't look worried at all.
I don't think he was lying
about not thinking about the future. I can see him winning his third Super
Bowl this February and then suddenly telling the press, in his barely
audible way, that he's calling it quits. But I can just as easily see the
look of worry on his face a few years later, as he's reading one of the rare
volumes from his football library, the salt air blowing through his
curtains, distracted by the silence, until someone calls and asks him if he
has a little free time to review some film. They'll have it flown in. It'll
be waiting for him at the airport. |
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